Modern Warfare makes meaningful tech upgrades to the Call of Duty franchise, making it look and sound better than ever while still maintaining its crisp, exciting gameplay.

A tough, rewarding puzzle game that will take you a while to master, and even longer to unlock all the available content.

While Modern Warfare certainly has its issues, I’m having a really terrific time with it.

This is meat-and-potatoes action game design with a few antiquated quirks, but it does what it does well enough--and looks legitimately stunning while doing it--to deliver a satisfying experience, all told.

It’s a great-looking game with really strong sound design. That stuff helped make the campaign worth seeing, and it’s part of why I keep coming back to the competitive multiplayer, too.

I was really satisfied with the three or four hours it took me to get through Launch of the Narwhal, and the episode ends on a delicious cliffhanger that has me eager to see what happens in next month's episode.

This is meat-and-potatoes action game design with a few antiquated quirks, but it does what it does well enough--and looks legitimately stunning while doing it--to deliver a satisfying experience, all told.

In more ways than one, No More Heroes is to games what Crank is the movies--this is a deliberately stupid and absurd game made with incredible craft and passion by people who love video games and hate being bored. No More Heroes 2 is a game seemingly designed specifically to surprise people who have played a lot of video games, and to this end, it's a smashing success.

This is meat-and-potatoes action game design with a few antiquated quirks, but it does what it does well enough--and looks legitimately stunning while doing it--to deliver a satisfying experience, all told.

A game with some amazing moments and enough little issues to make you constantly wish that it was slightly better, slightly smoother, and (on consoles) slightly cleaner.

It's good that the developers have backed this story up with sharp, time-tested gameplay that gets enhanced in meaningful ways across all modes.

If you're looking for a solid, lengthy solo campaign from a driving game, this isn't what you're looking for. Most Wanted is a multiplayer-first game, and taken in that context, few games do it better than this.

On PS4, it runs at least as smooth as Bloodborne did and with much faster load times (with the trade-off of occasionally slow-loading textures.)

On Xbox One, Dark Souls III runs at a noticeably choppier frame rate and a slightly lower resolution than the PS4 build, but it's still very a playable and stable and solid port of the game.

My recommendation for the PC build has to come with a firmer qualification. Yes, I still really enjoyed my time with Dark Souls 3 on PC. Yes, I’ll probably play through at least one run of NG+. But my enjoyment was seriously impacted by the unpredictable performance and crashing.

Some of the trimming around the outer edges is shaky, but the core of Def Jam Rapstar is rock-solid, and the community video feature is sure to provide a lot of entertainment on its own.

This oddball shooter sequel piles on more of everything from the first game, which is exactly what that game needed.

The 360 game offers enough value for block-building neophytes to justify its existence in a world where Minecraft has already seemingly been wallpapered everywhere you look for the last couple of years.

Interactive storytelling might not yet be able to evoke the same degree of raw human emotion as more traditional art forms, but this is a big step in the right direction.

Some of the trimming around the outer edges is shaky, but the core of Def Jam Rapstar is rock-solid, and the community video feature is sure to provide a lot of entertainment on its own.

With its less-than-full-price and short list of features, the first Garden Warfare felt like EA wasn't willing to risk much on the odd idea of turning a cutesy mobile free-to-play tower defense game into a console online shooter. It feels like a little piece of cosmic justice that while the Medal of Honor reboot failed to make any inroads with that audience, Garden Warfare somehow became a runaway success that warranted a full-priced, fully featured sequel.

It clearly establishes a repeating theme of Max gaining and then exploiting ridiculous new psychic powers with each episode, something that, if the quality of the execution stays where it is, should make for a fun season.

One of my favorite things about Hell's Highway is the fact that you can spend as much time commanding your squads as you do actually shooting enemies yourself.

So perhaps Sleeping Dogs isn't one of those games you'll want to keep on playing long after you've seen its story's conclusion. But while you're engaged with that story, this is an effective open-world experience, filled with interesting characters, some exciting action, and enough unpredictability to keep you hooked. It might feel familiar, but that doesn't make it any less fun.

Electronic Symphony doesn't rebuild the concept of Lumines block-by-block, but this Vita launch game is still the most fun I've had with the franchise since it debuted on the PSP back in 2004.

Call of Duty: World at War is a perfectly competent game with exciting multiplayer options and a campaign that's worth playing. But in most of the ways that actually count, last year's game was better.

The finished game--which only made it to release thanks to a last-minute rescue from Square Enix--won't be remembered as one of the world's great open-world crime games. But it will be thought of as a good, solid one that did enough right to be mostly fun from start to finish. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

If anything, NBA 2K14 signals that great things are on the horizon for this franchise on these new platforms, and that things are already off to a very good start.